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   <title>VisIt 1.10 Release Notes</title>
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<center><b><font size="6">VisIt 1.10 Release Notes</font></b></center>

<p>Welcome to VisIt's release notes page. This page describes the important
enhancements and bug-fixes that were added to this release.</p>
<p><b><font size="4">Announcements</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>The VisIt team released a patch release, <a href="relnotes1.9.1.html">version 1.9.1</a>, to
    fix some critical defects that surfaced in the VisIt 1.9 release. Descriptions of the defects addressed
    by the patch release can be found in the <a href="relnotes1.9.1.html">VisIt 1.9.1 release notes</a>. 
    All version 1.9.1 fixes are included in this release.</li>
    <li>The mesh quality metrics have been updated to use the latest version of the Verdict library. This affects the mesh quality metrics as well as all calculations involving the volume of an element. More information can be found in the <a href="#General_Features">Features for all users</a> section.</li>
    <li>The streamline plot has been significantly improved.  More information can be found in the <a href="#Plot_changes">Changes to plots</a> section.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Sections</b></p>
<ul>
    <li><a href="#General_Features">Features for all users</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Advanced_Features">Features for advanced users</a></li>
    <li><a href="#File_format">Changes to file format readers</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Plot_changes">Changes to plots</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Operator_changes">Changes to operators</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Expression_changes">Changes to expressions</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Query_changes">Changes to picks and queries</a></li>
    <li><a href="#CLI_changes">Changes to the command line interface</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Bugs_fixed">Other bug fixes</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Config_changes">Changes to machine configuration files</a></li>
    <li><a href="#Dev_changes">Changes for VisIt developers</a></li>
</ul>

<a name="General_Features"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">General features added in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>The mesh quality metrics have been updated to use Verdict
        version 110.  The new version calculates shear and hexahedral
        volumes more accurately.  The Verdict volume metric is used for
        all volume calculations in VisIt, so any calculations that
        involve calculating the volume of a hexahedral element may
        change.  This includes many queries such as volume, centroid,
        center of mass, and spherical compactness.</li>

    <li>Initial support for internationalization has been added.  This
        allows the GUI to be translated into languages other than
        English, following standard Qt internationalization
        procedures.</li>

    <li>The performance was improved for data sets with many domains (or
        patches) as well as large AMR data sets.</li>

    <li>Queries that accept variables for input now have a variable
        widget for ease of entry.  </li>

    <li>The Overlay button has been changed so that it only creates new
        copies of the selected plots in the plot list instead of copying
        all plots in the plot list.  The new behavior results in far
        fewer unwanted plots when using overlay to create new plots with
        a different database.  Overlay was also changed so that it is
        possible to overlay plots from a specific database time
        step.</li>

    <li>The Subset window is now considerably faster when selecting over
        a large number of domains.</li>

    <li>The Pick Window has two new buttons: Repeat Pick will repeat a
        pick at the same location as the previous pick without
        displaying a new pick letter but using possibly updated
        attributes (e.g., showing additional variables).  Display in
        Spreadsheet will show the previous pick location in a
        Spreadsheet plot.</li>

</ul>

<a name="Advanced_Features"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Advanced features added in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>VisIt now attempts to use the loopback device (127.0.0.1)
        for <i>all</i> local connections.  This should fix many startup failures
        on platforms which are related to networking issues like VPN, incorrect
        hostnames, or firewalls blocking ports on external interfaces.  <i>To disable
        this feature, add the "-noloopback" argument when starting visit.</i></li>
    <li>VisIt now supports the IceT library for improved rendering times.  
        IceT requires a parallel version of VisIt, and is only supported in 
        scalable rendering mode.  Use the <tt>-icet</tt> command line option 
        to enable use of IceT for a session.</li>
    <li>VisIt's plugin managers have been reworked so that multiple instances
        can coexist in the same process. This enables simulations that are
        instrumented with libsim (and are thus VisIt compute engines) to include
        other VisIt components such as the VisIt Python interface. A simulation
        that is both a VisIt CLI and a VisIt compute engine can create plots
        using VisIt's normal Python scripting but also generate the plotted data 
        as a simulation.</li>
    <li>SSH port forwarding now includes more local tunnelled ports.  This
        helps use port forwarding with more than one engine.</li>
    <li>When all components of VisIt have been built with a version of Mesa which
        supports large offscreen images, VisIt will allow you to save images
        up to a resolution of 16k<sup>2</sup>.</li>
    <li>The "visitconvert" file converter tool now allows the user to set
        values for the writing file format options.  It also now supports the
        -assume_format and -default_format input plugin specification arguments.</li>
</ul>

<a name="File_format"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">File format reader changes in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>VisIt now supports the UNIC file format.</li>
    <li>VisIt now supports the PFLOTRAN file format, including automatic
        decomposition of data for parallel I/O and computation.</li>
    <li>The FLASH reader has been enhanced to read particles of file format 
        version 9.  The reader should now read all files with particles.</li>
    <li>The FLASH reader has been fixed to, again, prevent coincident blocks from
        different refinement levels from being drawn over one another.</li>
    <li>The Tecplot reader has received several enhancements:
    <ul><li>The reader can read binary Tecplot files.</li>
        <li>It now handles DOS-formatted text files correctly.</li>
        <li>The curves it generates can now be used in expressions</li>
        <li>It supports newer versions of the Tecplot ASCII format specification.</li>
        <li>It will now correctly guess coordinate variables even with units (e.g. "meters") in the variable names</li>
    </ul></li>
    <li>The XDMF reader has been fixed so that it no longer causes memory problems when
        reading meshes of type VxVyVz, which are curvilinear meshes where the coordinates
        exist in separate HDF5 arrays.</li>
    <li>The XDMF reader has been fixed so that it can also read HDF data items of type char, unsigned char, int, and unsigned int. It could already read float and double.</li>
    <li>The XDMF reader now supports a BaseIndex attribute as an Information field in a Grid. The BaseIndex specifies the location of a structured grid within either a rectilinear or curvilinear multiblock mesh.</li>
    <li>VisIt now supports various changes made in the Nek3D file format.</li>
    <li>The BOV reader has been optimized to perform better when using a large number
        of processors.  Previously, all of VisIt's processors read the same header
        file simultaneously, which severely affects parallel performance on some
        machines.  In addition, the BOV reader now correctly supports large
        (4GB or more) files.</li>
    <li>The VTK reader will now read 'CYCLE' from the FieldData (both
        legacy and xml formats).  It also fully supports the 'Try harder
        to get accurate cycles/times' option.</li>

    <li>The EnSight reader now correctly supports wildcard substitution
        in EnSight files.</li>

    <li>VisIt automatically adds mesh quality expressions for
        curvilinear and unstructured meshes.  However, it limits the
        number of expressions it adds (when faced with a large number of
        meshes) to not incur performance costs.  The mechanism for
        choosing which meshes receive the mesh quality expressions has
        been improved to pick the most important meshes.</li>

    <li>A crash was fixed for the TimeVaryingExodus file format.</li>
    <li>The DDCMD reader was enhanced to support reading 'b' field types
        and to be able to plot the stress tensor.</li>

    <li>The PlainText reader now generates curves which can be used in
        expressions.  It also always exposes the coordinate arrays as
        variables to mitigate the repercussions of incorrect
        coordinate-variable guessing.</li>

    <li>The CHGCAR (VASP) reader can now both automatically
        domain decompose data files when reading them, allowing these readers to
        obtain speedups through both parallel I/O and parallel computation.</li>
    <li>The Vista/Diablo format no longer crashes on some 64-bit systems.</li>
    <li>The Protein Data Bank format now exposes the Temperature and 
        Occupancy Factor columns as new variables.</li>
    <li>An off by one error was fixed in the PDB reader, ensuring that
        the correct material names are used.</li>

    <li>The VASP, TFT, MM5, basic NETCDF, FITS, Cale and Silo readers
        now generate curves which can be used in expressions.</li>

</ul>

<a name="Plot_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to VisIt's plots in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>The Streamline plot has been significantly improved.
    <ul>
         <li>It can now integrate streamlines across domain
             boundaries.</li>

         <li>It now works correctly in both serial and parallel
             (including distributed memory parallelism).</li>

         <li>It has a parallel processing mode that allows for
             parallelization to occur over streamlines, allowing for
             large data sets to be processed with limited resources.
             This mode requires ghost data and knowledge of the extents
             of each domain.  If that data is not available, it can
             still create correct streamlines, albeit by processing all
             the domains.</li>

         <li>The integration methods are more numerically correct than
             those previously used.</li>

         <li>Two dimensional streamlines can no longer be easily
             obscured by other plots, such as the Pseudocolor plot.</li>

    </ul></li>
    <li>The Spreadsheet plot's data window has been fixed on the MacOS X
        platform so the File, Edit, and Operations menu are once again
        available as they are on other platforms.</li>
    <li>Ray-casted volume rendering would sometimes incorrectly cull
        away domains with non-square windows.  This bug has been fixed.</li>
    <li>The Histogram plot now does its default weighting by frequency.</li>
    <li>The Vector plot now has the ability to only show one vector per
        original cell or node.  This is useful when making Vector plots
        from data which has been clipped -- or any similar process which
        divides cells or creates new nodes.  This option is enabled by
        default.</li>
    <li>The Vector plot now uses the "Restrict to" number of vectors as
        a value over the whole problem, not just a single domain.  This
        improves consistency between single- and multi-block problems,
        and for file formats which automatically decompose data for a
        variable number of processors.</li>
    <li>Curve plots now have labels if they were loaded from files or
        generated by expressions or queries.</li>
</ul>

<a name="Operator_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to VisIt's operators in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>A memory issue with the Clip operator was fixed.  This issue led
        to intermittent crashes previously.</li>

    <li>VisIt now provides a "Dual Mesh Operator" to aid with using the
        resample operator on images.  This operator only works on
        rectilinear grids and creates the dual mesh of the input, with
        the following two conversion modes:

        <ul>
          <li>Nodes to Zones: Creates output zones centered at input
              nodes and converts point data to cell data</li>

          <li>Zones to Nodes: Creates output nodes centered at input
              zone centers and converts cell data to point data.</li>
        </ul>
        You can explicitly choose how you want to convert or use Auto,
        which looks at the primary variable to determine the proper
        direction.  </li>

        For conversion examples see:
        <a href="http://visitusers.org/index.php?title=Dual_Mesh_Operator">http://visitusers.org/index.php?title=Dual_Mesh_Operator</a>

    <li>The Transform Operator now supports an arbitrary 3x3 linear
        transform matrix.</li>

    <li>A problem with using the Box Operator on Curves was fixed.</li>
</ul>

<a name="Expression_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to VisIt's expression language in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>There is a new <i>exp</i> function for calculating
        e<sup>n</sup>.</li>

    <li>There is a new <i>transpose</i> function for tensor data.</li>
    <li>The Laplacian function was reimplemented for rectilinear data to
        be more efficient and to only require a single layer of ghost
        cells.</li>

    <li>The area and revolved volume functions now support arbitrary 2D polygons.</li>

    <li>New functions for <i>min_corner_angle</i> and
        <i>max_corner_angle</i> were added.  This function is not
        exposed by default, as it gives ambiguous answers vis-a-vis
        arcsin.</li>

    <li>In the past, expressions have often gotten confused as to
        whether they are scalars or vectors.  This issue should be much
        improved.</li>

    <li>The expression language now supports using backslashes to escape
        the next character.  For example, some variable names like "dist
        (cm)" can now be specified either using the original quoting
        mechanism, i.e. <tt>&lt;dist (cm)&gt;</tt>, or with backslashes,
        i.e. <tt>dist\ \(cm\)</tt></li>

    <li>Backslashes may also be used as directory separators in file
        names.  Note, however, that due to the backslash-escaping
        mechanism, you must use two successive backslashes here, e.g.
        <tt>\\path\\to\\file.vtk</tt>.  This is only a convenience;
        forward slashes still work the same as before.</li>
</ul>

<a name="Query_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to VisIt's picks and queries in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>Query-over-time of a non-default variable now uses the correct variable name and units in the legend.</li>
    <li>Pick-through-time now uses the variable name and units for the y-axis labels.</li>
    <li>Pick no longer gets confused about which variable to use when performed after a doing a Query of a non-default variable.</li>
    <li>Pick now works on time-curves.</li>
    <li>Queries such as NumNodes and Variable Sum now work correctly with material selection enabled.</li>
    <li>The area and revolved volume queries now support arbitrary 2D polygons.</li>
    <li>The Hohlraum Flux query now does a better job of issuing warnings in error conditions and not crashing.  Also, this query now gives output in full double precision.</li>
    <li>The Shapelet Decomposition query was updated to retain the original spatial extents in the recomposition output.</li>
</ul>

<a name="CLI_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to VisIt's command-line interface in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>The <i>OverlayDatabase</i> function now accepts an optional second argument for specifying a time state.</li>
    <li>When bringing up the CLI from the GUI's <i>Controls->Command</i> window, it is no longer necessary to enter a string to activate the Execute button.  (The CLI can now be launched directly without a dummy command.)</li>
    <li>Python callbacks no longer fail silently.  If you have registered a function with an incorrect signature, you will now get a proper error message.</li>
    <li>A hang when attempting <i>OpenGUI()</i> from the cli on Windows has been fixed.</li>
</ul>

<a name="Bugs_fixed"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Other bugs fixed in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>If you combine a ray-casted volume rendering with transparent geometry, VisIt now issues an error message and no longer hangs.</li>
    <li>The "visit -movie" movie generation script once again can detect the engine configuration 
        used to generate the plots in a session file and can reuse that configuration when 
        generating a movie.</li>
        <li>For windows platforms, running <i>visit -cli -o</i>, <i>visit -cli -s</i>, or double-clicking a <i>.py</i> now correctly parses paths and works correctly.</li>
    <li>Macro recording for 2D zooming no longer produces invalid Python code for setting the 2D view attributes.</li>
    <li>Macro creation now does more checking to make sure that macro names are valid, which prevents problems when the macros are actually registered.</li>
    <li>VisIt's libsim library used a non-zero idle timeout that slowed down polling simulations.</li>
    <li>Restore session from sources now works again.</li>
    <li>VisIt displays the files from localhost in the File panel when the <i>-launchengine</i> argument is provided to launch a remote compute engine.</li>
    <li>If you apply a resample operator to a FilledBoundary plot, VisIt now issues a warning and no longer crashes.</li>
    <li>On Macs, if you used the Variables dropdown to change the variable of a plot and if that variable was invalid (e.g. a bad expression), then VisIt
        will no longer crash.</li>
    <li>The "Lock Tools" icon in the toolbar is now grouped correctly with the other "Lock" icons.</li>
    <li>The deprecated Parallel Axis plot has been removed.  Use the new Parallel Coordinates plot instead.</li>
    <li>Issues with log-log scaling of mulitple curves have been resolved.</li>
    <li>VisIt's check for X11 terminals on Mac OS X has been improved.</li>
    <li>Materials defined on point meshes in an instrumented simulation cannot be plotted successfully.</li>
</ul>
</ul>

<a name="Config_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes to configuration files in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>Host profiles for ORNL's visualization cluster, lens, have been added.</li>
    <li>Host profiles for ORNL's Cray XT4/5, jaguar, have been added.</li>
    <li>The host profiles for LLNL's yana system have been modified to use SLURM and Moab.</li>
    <li>The host profiles for LLNL's hopi system have been modified to use SLURM and Moab.</li>
    <li>The parallel hardware accelerated host profile for LLNL's gauss
        cluster has been modified for Chaos 4.</li>
    <li>The host profiles for LLNL's up system have been modified to use Moab.</li>
    <li>"-switch ib" has been removed from all of LLNL's host profiles
        since it is no longer necessary.</li>
</ul>

<a name="Dev_changes"></a>
<p><b><font size="4">Changes for VisIt developers in version 1.10</font></b></p>
<ul>
    <li>Development on Windows can now be done directly from the SVN
        repository, as the build process has been modified to use the
        native source tree instead of a modified one.</li>

    <li>The Klocwork tool was applied to VisIt and many potential bugs
        were found and fixed.</li>

    <li>The method for running all of VisIt's perl scripts was changed, making
        launching somewhat simpler, internally.</li>

    <li>The source code was improved to reduce the number of compiler
        warnings.</li>
</ul>

<p>Click the following link to view the release notes for the previous version
of VisIt: <a href="relnotes1.9.0.html">VisIt 1.9 Release Notes</a>.</p>
<p>Click the following link to view the release notes for the next version
of VisIt: <a href="relnotes1.11.0.html">VisIt 1.11.0 Release Notes</a>.</p>
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